


In the Arms of Inverness

by gardnerhill



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Aww, Community: watsons_woes, Gen, Prompt Fic, Sherlock's Coat, Watson's Woes July Writing Prompts 2015
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-08 21:20:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4321155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gardnerhill/pseuds/gardnerhill
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For some it’s an iconic cape. For Dr. Watson it is comfort personified.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the Arms of Inverness

**Author's Note:**

> For the 2015 July Watson's Woes Promptfest prompt #11, _**Coat Porn**_ _. Whether it's BBC Sherlock's amazing Belstaff, Joan Watson's slickers, or classic Victorian overcoats, let outerwear be your inspiration for today's entry._

“Damn my leg!”

I stopped under a tree that was dangerously laden with snow, but too full of anger and self-loathing at my body’s weakness to care at present.

I should not have accepted my friend’s invitation to join him in the country for this case when I had still not recovered from my war injuries. I was slowing down the pursuit, as I’d feared. The cold was like a knife straight through my thigh in the precise path of the bullet that had struck me whilst I had been unconscious with pain and blood-loss across Murray’s horse. I had still not truly acclimated myself to English weather after my sub-Continent service. Now I was up to mid-shins in the snow that blanketed the countryside darkening with early-winter sunset; and now that I had been forced to halt my stride across country, the cold began to sink into my bones. I gripped my treacherous lower limb as if wishing to throttle the contemptible weakling.

“Watson?” Holmes’ voice, getting closer. No, he was returning for me, that I could not allow.

“Go!” I waved a hand in his direction, not looking away from where the other hand vainly kneaded at the knotted, damaged muscle. “The station-master must be warned! It’s just a twinge, I’ll be along presently. Time is precious.”

A pause. I kept my teeth locked so that he would not hear them chatter; I dreaded the thought of him staying – or worse, assisting me, and me slowing him down like an anchor chained to his ankle when he needed speed.

“Very well. Then keep this for me.”

Warmth billowed around my shoulders and settled close about me like an embrace. The cold retreated at once.

I looked up in time to see Sherlock Holmes finish settling his heavy wool Inverness cape about me. He smiled at my expression. “The race to the station should keep me warm enough, should it not?”

I beamed. My leg still hurt abominably, but every other part of me was warm. “And he’ll have tea for you. Go.”

He did so with an alacrity that filled me with relief even as he quickly vanished from sight, leaving me alone in a darkening snowy woods. He trusted me to care for myself until he could return, or to make my way back to the inn on my own. And he had not left me unprotected.

***

When my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes goes out and about London on his daily business, or heads out for a meal and entertainment in the evening, he is a man of impeccable sartorial elegance. However, rather to his annoyance, Mr. Paget repeatedly used my friend’s durable, practical country-wear as the model for his illustrations of my stories; this outfit – deerstalker, Ulster, Inverness – became irreparably fixed in the public’s mind with how my friend appears, giving Holmes the image of a bumpkin from the North country who wears his grouse-hunting outfit to an opera in the West End.

Yet no matter what ludicrous situation in which I see that outfit – in an illustration by Paget or his successors for a crime story set in London, on the stage(!) or in music-hall lampoons – I can never look at that Inverness cape without feeling a flood of affection, and a return of the warmth and trust it represented to me from the very first time I saw him wear it.


End file.
